A Mighty Story Retold

Toil and Trouble: A History of American Labor
by Thomas R. Brooks, foreword by A.H. Raskin
Delacorte, 300 pp., $6.00

There are Civil War buffs who read and reread the chronicles of that immensely important time. There are labor buffs and I am one—for whom Antietam was never as searing as Harlan County, which is merely a statement of fact and not meant to belittle the one or exaggerate the historic scale of the other. The cordwainers, the Knights, the Homestead strikers, the sit-in auto workers are the heroes I’ve lived with. Tell their story a hundred or a thousand times, and it is always fresh and inspiring. Mighty legends are like that, and t...